ABSTRACT
On 17 January 1991, US President George Bush gave a televised speech in which he announced the military operation in Iraq. The speech was meant to symbolise the end of the Cold War and reflected the new state of global affairs in which the USA, as sole superpower, should play a bigger role than it had done in the past. This chapter analyses the evolution of the New World Order conspiracy theory in post-Soviet Russia. It provides a comparative analysis of the theory both in the US context and in that of post-Soviet Russia, in order to highlight the peculiarities of the post-Soviet Russian conspiracy culture, and considers its functions in Russian politics and society. As M. Barkun argues, the concept of the New World Order attained a particular popularity in the 1990s due to the convenience of bringing together diverse conspiracy theories into one metanarrative structure.
